We recently implemented a long overdue feature at the request of one of our clients. Did you know that as an Appointment Aid customer you can request custom features?

The new feature is…. Appointment Notes! Appointment notes are exactly what they sound like; Notes about an appointment. Now when you go to schedule an appointment or edit a current appointment, there will be a “notes” field where you can input and edit notes about the appointment as seen here:

You can casually view the appointment’s notes by hovering your mouse over any appointment in your calendar that currently has a note attached to it. An example of this can be seen here:

This features is already available in all new and old Appointment Aid accounts. If you have any trouble with it or questions about, don’t forget to contact us! We love hearing from our customers and potential customers.

When you are new to Appointment Aid, your dashboard may seem overwhelming to you. A lot of new customers don’t realize all of the different features available to them when they sign up. One often overlooked feature is the multiple different calendar views each user gets. Using Appointment Aids appointment reminder service, you have the option of using a combination of the “Month view / Day view” or the “Week View”. The different views have different advantages depending on the type of user you are.

Using Month View / Day View:

Month View:

From the month view you get a birds eye view of all of the appointments scheduled for your account for a given month. Each day is populated with a count of total appointments for that day on that specific calendar. As you can see, this customer (our test account) only has 5 scheduled appointments on September 1st, and no other appointments. Let’s click the day of September 1st to trigger the day view to show.

Day View:

In the day view for September 1 you can see all 5 of the appointments are in the “scheduled status” which means appointments have been scheduled in the system, but reminders have not yet been sent out for this appointment. The other possible status codes are listed in a horizontal line as seen in the image. Below that you can see multiple appointments scheduled for various “test” clients.

Using Month/Day view is better for users who like to schedule multiple clients during the same time slot. This is because in the week view when you schedule multiple clients using the same time slot, it appears poorly in the user interface as you will see in an image below.

Using Week View:

Week/Month View is the standard setup for new Appointment Aid users. For most users it is perfect and exactly what they need. They have a small month calendar on the right to choose what week they want to work with and the main week view on the left to add and edit appointments. However, as mentioned above, if you are a Business that schedules multiple clients during the same appointment time slot, Week view looks pretty bad. You can see in the picture above the same 3 appointments that had plenty of room in day view are very crammed in week view. This user would benefit much more from using the day view.

How To Switch Views

Now that I’ve explained the pro’s and cons of the different views it’s time to show just how simple it is to change between these views. To change between views is extremely simple. All you do is click the dropdown box on the top right of the screen that says “Change Default Calendar View:” and then select which view you’d like to see. From that point on that will be the view that loads for your account by default. You can always go back and change it though. Here is a picture showing the dropdown box location:

Pretty simple right?

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Today we are proud to announce our newest feature added by customer request! All accounts can now have unlimited reminder script sets.

What Are Script Sets?

A script set in Appointment Aid is a group of 1 Phone reminder recording, 1 sms text message script, and 1 email script. You can now create multiple sets with custom messages in each reminder for any scenario you can think of. In the past all accounts only had 1 script set containing 1 phone, sms, and email reminder script. With multiple script sets, you can now perform actions such as “patient reactivation” and more. All you have to do to get started is head over to the scripts page in your account. You will be able to create new sets, duplicate current sets, edit, and delete. To apply a script set to an appointment, all you have to do is select the script set from a drop down box when you are scheduling you appointment like normal.

Things to note:
- When you delete a custom script set, all appointments scheduled with that script set will revert to your default script set immediately.
- When you create a new script, it will be originally based off of the system wide default Appointment Aid scripts.
- When you click the “reset to default” button within a custom script, it will reset it to the system wide default Appointment Aid script for that script type.

We are very excited to continually release new features that our customers request. Please don’t hesitate to let support know of any features you’d like to see added to Appointment Aid in the future. We look forward to hearing from you!

We are very excited to announce today that as of a couple weeks ago we added a brand new feature: Reminder Timing Profiles.

What are Reminder Timing Profiles?

Reminder timing profiles are custom settings you can apply to each appointment you create. Lets say that you don’t want your appointment reminders to be sent out before 12pm on Sundays. Previously the only option you had was to set your reminder timing settings for ALL of your appointments to 12pm the day before scheduled appointments. But no one wants to do that!

Now with custom reminder timing profiles you can create custom timing settings that you can apply to individual appointments. Each appointment that you schedule can have 2 of each kind of reminders sent out to your clients. You can now completely control when your clients will receive their appointment reminders. Once you have created and saved your appointment reminder timing profiles, you can apply it to new (or existing) appointments during creation or when editing them.

We are very excited for the addition of this new feature as it unlocks another higher level of customization to our service. Whether you’re making custom reminder timing profiles for each client or each day, it’s all possible now.

As always we are open to any new feature suggestions so please don’t hesitate to contact us and inform us of changes/additions you’d like to see within our service.

How often are your clients or customers late for appointments? You schedule a customer to come in at 3pm for an appointment and it’s now 3:04pm. You’re standing there staring at the door, looking back to the clock, and back to the door, and so on. It’s now 3:10pm and you’re starting to wonder if your customer is just late or if they are not coming at all. You’re starting to get a little angry. Now you’re getting very angry. Now you’re in a bad mood whether your customer shows up or not.

Now let’s flip that situation around. You’re a customer and a service provider schedules you an appointment at 3pm. They send you an sms appointment reminder at 3pm the day before. You show up to your appointment at 2:55pm, 5 minutes early. It’s now 3:10pm and you’re still waiting in the waiting area for your appointment to start. 3:15pm rolls around and you’re starting to wonder if the business forgot about you. By 3:25pm you’re pretty angry that you showed up on time for your appointment when your service provider can’t do the same. You’re now in a bad mood, and way more likely to have a bad experience with that business just because you’re already angry before your appointment even starts.

It happens way more often than you might think:

How often do you put a sour taste in a customer’s mouth before even beginning their appointment? In 2014 where there are always 50 other competitors doing what you do, customer relationships is what can set you apart from the rest. Don’t damage a relationship before it starts. Think about it.